1.05.2006

As you all may know, Jerome Rothenberg is working on a vast Romantics anthology of 19th century poetry to g with the giant 20th century anthologies he just did with Pierre Joris.

It is international in scope, and while I was visiting him a few months ago, he was talking with Jesse Glass (Diane and I were there of course, also) about various south Asian female poets, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese, their various merits, but the difficulty of including them, even though they were 19th century poets of some repute, since they didn't really fit under the rubric "romantic."

But I did want to mention this because, although it is months later from the conversation, of course, Jerome Rothenberg is still open to scholarly lobbying on behalf of poets, particularly outside the US and UK, who are female excellent poets of the 19th century who can be seen in an interesting light when considering the label "romantic."

My own attempt to rewrite Wordsworth's famous preface and revisitation of a Coleridge word hoard I had once thought to attempt have been tweaking me the last few days because of their sense of not writing what everyone else at time thought of as poetry, and of course with my experimentalist slant, I wonder too and those women writers out there -- beyond Dorothy Wordsworth -- who were writing what would have been at that time "poetically" rather than poetry --